Saturday, April 3, 2010

Monday Socks

I recently bought some socks. I fell in love with them at first sight, because they were black. I have this theory that black socks are best, because when they emerge from the washing machine they all look roughly the same and can be paired up with relative ease. My system for pairing-up is simple - if one sock is black and the other sock is black, then that’s a pair.

But these particular socks really did promise an absolutely perfect match every time. Each pair in the packet had the name of a day embroidered on their toes. And the name of each day was embroidered in a different colour. For example, “Monday” was embroidered in red, which seemed appropriate for the first day of the week – a red-letter-day!

Well, it seemed like a brilliant idea at the time, so I bought them. What a terrible mistake that was. You see, I’d forgotten one of the basic laws of physics, which is that when you put an even number of socks into the washing machine, you get an odd number of socks out.

So I was faced with a puzzle. What on earth do you do with a single sock embroidered with the word “Monday” on its toe? My solution to this quandary was to keep my mobile phone in it.

Then a good friend of mine suggested it would be very avant-garde if I continued to wear my Monday sock on one foot, with a Wednesday sock on the other foot. A brilliant idea!

So I started rummaging in my sock drawer to look for my Wednesday socks. At first, I thought this would be a straightforward project, because my Wednesday socks have the word “Wednesday” embroidered on the toe of each sock. But the search took forever.

You see, I keep each pair of socks neatly ravelled up in a small bundle. But you can’t see the toes in a bundle. And as all my socks are black, all the bundles look identical. So I had to unravel each bundled pair. Whilst doing this, I came across a pair of socks that weren’t really a pair at all. The two socks were of different lengths. I had to lay these two mismatched socks on the bed, in the hope that I would find more mismatched pairs and be able to reconcile the problem later. Well, I did find several other mismatched pairs, and eventually I was able to reunite these socks into pairs of equal length and re-bundle accordingly.

At first I was quite pleased with myself. Then I remembered my original objective, which was to find my Wednesday socks. I hadn’t found them. So I looked in the laundry basket. No Wednesday socks. I looked inside the washing machine, which I had used earlier. No luck. I peered under the bed. No luck there either. I searched high and low, but my Wednesday socks had vanished.

Eventually, the truth dawned on me. The reason I couldn’t find my Wednesday socks was because it WAS Wednesday, and I was wearing them. Silly me, I thought, and I took my shoes off to check. Sure enough, there they were, on my feet, where they had been all the time. It was then that the really dreadful truth became apparent.

Both of my Wednesday socks are adorned with the word “Wednesday” in GREEN embroidery. But my solitary Monday sock has the word “Monday” embroidered in RED. I was instantly reminded of the old adage “Red and Green should never be seen”. So alas, there is no way I can wear one of my Wednesdays with my Monday.

Happily, I do know where my mobile phone is. It is inside my Monday sock, hanging on the washing line, but still ringing and wringing wet.:-)